Getting Started with God Is Able
Priscilla Shirer's God Is Able is a twelve-week Bible study designed for women who want to dig into scripture beyond surface-level reading. It's published by LifeWay and is built around her book of the same name, which focuses on the story of the Israelites in the wilderness and how their struggles mirror modern spiritual battles. The program has a video component, discussion guides, and personal reflection work that you're expected to do between meetings. Here's the thing most people don't tell you upfront: this isn't a casual Sunday School class. It requires real preparation. If you show up to a group session without watching the video lesson and doing the personal study, you're going to be lost. I've sat in study groups where half the room hadn't done the reading, and it drags the whole discussion into shallow water fast. The material itself is dense enough that rushing through it misses the point entirely.
What You Actually Get
The core resource is the God Is Able participant's guide, which breaks each week into sections covering Shirer's video teaching, discussion questions, and personal application exercises. There's also a leader's guide if you're running a group. You can purchase the whole package through LifeWay, or buy components separately depending on what you need. The video lessons run about twenty to thirty minutes each, and the written material adds another forty-five minutes or so of engagement per week if you're doing it properly. Some people try to use secondhand copies of the leader's guide thinking they'll save money. That usually backfires because the participant pages get written in during the first few weeks, and you end up with someone else's highlighted answers and margin notes scattered everywhere. It's not worth the five or six dollars you might save.
How to Set It Up for Your Group
If you're leading a study, start by going through the entire curriculum yourself before you ever meet with the group. I learned this the hard way in my first time running God Is Able. I thought I could wing it by reading the leader's notes right before each session. Week three hit me with a discussion question that required understanding a specific Hebrew word translation that Shirer mentions in her video, and I had no idea what was going on. The group noticed. It was awkward. After that, I made a rule: watch the video lesson twice before teaching it. The first time is for your own understanding. The second time, you pause and take notes on which segments might need extra explanation because Shirer moves fast through some of the heavier theological points. She has a habit of stacking concepts rapidly, and what sounds clear on one viewing often needs a second pass to unpack properly. Plan for each meeting to run about two hours if your group is engaged. Don't try to compress it into ninety minutes. The discussion portions are where people actually process the material, and cutting that short turns a spiritual study into a lecture. I've seen groups try to rush through to "get more done," and by week eight everyone was disengaged because they never sat with any of the content long enough for it to land.
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Common Problems and Workarounds
One issue that comes up constantly with God Is Able is that some of the study questions assume a certain level of biblical literacy that not every participant has. Shirer references books of the Bible and historical context without always spelling it out for beginners. If you have someone in your group who is newer to studying scripture seriously, pair them with someone who's been through a couple of studies already. Don't announce it formally, just make sure it happens naturally during discussions. Another practical problem: the study moves through Exodus and the wilderness narrative pretty intensively. If your group has people who struggle with the Old Testament genealogies and law codes, that's going to be a friction point around weeks four and five. I handled this by sending out a short pre-reading note a few days before those sessions, pointing people to a one-page summary of the Israelite timeline so they weren't getting lost in the details. You can find free timelines online, or just type out the basic sequence yourself and email it. It takes ten minutes and prevents a lot of confusion.
Is It Worth the Time Investment?
Depends on what you're looking for. God Is Able is not a feel-good, light-reading devotional. It's designed to confront you with some uncomfortable truths about obedience, pride, and how easily people drift when they stop taking scripture seriously. That's by design, and it's what makes it effective for people who are ready for that kind of challenge. It's less useful if you're looking for comfort or encouragement without any real pushback. The biggest limitation I'd note is that Shirer's teaching style is very conviction-based. She presses hard on personal responsibility and repentance, and some participants find that exhausting rather than helpful. If your group tends to respond better to gentler, more exploratory approaches, you might consider pairing this study with something more reflective afterward so people have space to process without feeling constantly challenged. Not a flaw in the curriculum itself, just a compatibility issue with certain group dynamics. If you're considering downloading or accessing any materials outside of official LifeWay channels, be careful. There are sites offering pirated copies of the study guides and video downloads, and the quality is often poor or incomplete. More importantly, using unauthorized materials undermines the people who wrote and produced this content. It's a small thing to pay for what you're using, and it keeps these resources available for other groups who might not have the budget.
The study works best when people commit to doing the personal work between meetings, not just showing up for the group discussion. That's where the actual transformation happens, and skipping it turns God Is Able into just another Tuesday night social hour with a religious topic attached.
